In Cognitive Gadgets, Heyes (Reference Heyes2018) proposes “cultural evolutionary psychology” to unite the long-opposed “High Church” evolutionary psychology (especially Cosmides & Tooby Reference Cosmides and Tooby1996; Tooby & Cosmides Reference Tooby and Cosmides1992) with cultural evolutionary approaches (especially the California School: Henrich Reference Henrich2015; Richerson & Boyd Reference Richerson and Boyd2005). This effort promises to invite further engagement across disciplinary boundaries, with important points made about adding clarity to aspects of cultural evolutionary theory that have been as yet underspecified. Heyes highlights the disciplinary baggage that cultural evolutionary theory carries from its roots in anthropology and biology, leading to a tendency to black-box the brain and leading also to conceptual ambiguity about how social and cultural learning differs. Adding a more explicitly cognitive science perspective to these theories may encourage engagement from more cognitively oriented researchers. Although we applaud this unifying effort, we still find it to be limited by its own cognitive science disciplinary baggage by being strikingly thin on cultural psychology.

The argument in chapter 2 in favour of isolating effects of nature, nurture, and culture exemplifies this culturally narrow view. Heyes focuses many of her arguments on trying to prove the point that cognitive mechanisms involved in mentalizing and social learning are domain-general. However, we find the discussion to be so focused on debating the nativists that it misses the opportunity to examine how teaching and learning environments vary across cultures to provide children with context-specific opportunities to develop the cognitive abilities needed to thrive as adults. Doing so implies (1) there is a single set of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms and that (2) existing cognitive research is the “core” of this set, with all variation being deviations around this core (perpetuating West vs. the Rest thinking, see: Henrich et al. Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan2010; Kim & Park Reference Kim, Park, Kim, Yang and Hwang2006; Kline et al. Reference Kline, Shamsudheen and Broesch2018). Worse still, it misses perhaps the most powerful element of cultural evolutionary theory: that culture itself evolves to produce these adaptations, leading to a diverse range of specific, indigenous psychologies that are fit to particular environments by culture. These culturally adapted, culturally produced learning environments provide the connection point between culture and cognition that builds locally adapted brains to particular environments. We focus our discussion on mindreading and autobiographical memory – both shaped by culturally specific, indigenous practices – as examples of how evolutionary cultural psychology might better examine cognitive adaptations that arise through adaptive socialization practices embedded within culture.

We largely agree with Heyes’ account of early-developing mentalizing developing from Bayesian, domain-general learning mechanisms and later-developing, more effortful mentalizing developing from input of culturally evolved practices. However, the print reading metaphor may be more confusing than it is illuminating. Perhaps the strongest evidence against the mentalizing-as-print-reading comparison comes from societies where mental state discussion is prohibited. In these societies with norms that treat the mind as an opaque container (a set of norms called the opacity doctrine or opacity of mind: Danziger & Rumsey Reference Danziger and Rumsey2013; Duranti Reference Duranti2015; Robbins & Rumsey Reference Robbins and Rumsey2008) verbal instances of mental state reasoning are far fewer than in more mind-focused societies. Were the parallel to print reading as solid as Heyes claims, one would expect mentalizing to be fully absent in these societies, just as one would expect print reading to be fully absent in individuals never exposed to explicit training in print reading. The data do not, however, bear this out. Rather, though early childhood false belief tests hit an average “pass” rate at a later age in these societies than in more mind-focused groups (Barrett et al. Reference Barrett, Broesch, Scott, He, Baillargeon and Di Wu2013; Callaghan et al. Reference Callaghan, Rochat, Lillard, Claux, Odden, Itakura, Tapanya and Singh2005; Mayer & Träuble Reference Mayer and Träuble2013; Slaughter & Zapata Reference Slaughter and Zapata2014), children do acquire this skill. Further, adults in these societies do use mental state information in their assessments of actions (i.e., moral right and punishment), but include outcome more than other more mind-focused (even collectivistic) groups (Barrett et al. Reference Barrett, Bolyanatz, Crittenden, Fessler, Fitzpatrick, Gurven, Henrich, Kanovsky, Kushnick, Pisor, Scelza, Stich, von Rueden, Zhao and Laurence2016; McNamara et al. Reference McNamara, Willard, Norenzayan and Henrich2019).

The solution to unpacking this, we suggest, lies in focusing on variation and process as these mentalizing and other social cognitive abilities develop. If we step out to consider the adaptive dynamics presented by various social-ecological contexts, we find different sets of adaptive pressures and challenges that inform different social cognitive solutions across societies. These social cognitive solutions are accompanied by unique, context-specific cultural learning environments that help foster those abilities to build locally adaptive indigenous psychologies.

Ecological conditions inform the social structures societies might adopt, which in turn influence the extent to which individual desires, beliefs, and preferences versus group norms (or shared expectations about correct actions in various contexts) guide behaviour. In unstable, resource-poor, and otherwise risky conditions, group structures are typically more central to daily survival and deviations from norms are less tolerated – making norms more informative predictors of behaviour (Fincher & Thornhill Reference Fincher and Thornhill2012; Gelfand et al. Reference Gelfand, Raver, Nishii, Leslie, Lun, Lim, Duan, Almaliach, Ang, Arnadottir, Aycan, Boehnke, Boski, Cabecinhas, Chan, Chhokar, D'Amato, Ferrer, Fischlmayr, Fischer, Fülöp, Georgas, Kashima, Kashima, Kim, Lempereur, Marquez, Othman, Overlaet, Panagiotopoulou, Peltzer, Perez-Florizno, Ponomarenko, Realo, Schei, Schmitt, Smith, Soomro, Szabo, Taveesin, Toyama, Van de Vliert, Vohra, Ward and Tamaguchi2011; Hruschka et al. Reference Hruschka, Efferson, Jiang, Falletta-Cowden, Sigurdsson, McNamara, Sands, Munira, Slingerland and Henrich2014; Van de Vliert Reference Van de Vliert2011). Hierarchically structured social systems also require stronger social norms, which are common in more traditional, less industrialized societies (Hofstede Reference Hofstede1986; Inglehart Reference Inglehart1997). In more stable, abundant environments and when institutional buffers against life's slings and arrows are reliably strong, individuals typically have more autonomy and norm deviation is more tolerated (Norris & Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2004; Van de Vliert Reference Van de Vliert2008).

Cultural variation in folk understanding of minds and behaviours (variable theories or models of mind: Lillard Reference Lillard1998; Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2011) may parallel how the aforementioned cultural dimensions and population dynamics modulate the behavioural predictive value of individual mental states versus group norms. If we consider these adaptive dynamics across contexts, we might approach mentalizing as a cognitive ability that modulates to fit the behavioural prediction needs of these social landscapes. In societies where norms are well known, relatively strict, and when social groups are highly stable due to low relational mobility, mentalizing may be simply less informative about behaviour. This, in turn, might foster a different set of social cognitive strategies that emphasize reference to norms or other social information rather than minds when predicting and interpreting behaviour (McNamara et al. Reference McNamara, Willard, Norenzayan and Henrich2019). This may partly explain cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error versus situation attribution (Choi et al. Reference Choi, Nisbett and Norenzayan1999; Norenzayan et al. Reference Norenzayan, Choi, Nisbett, Prentice and Miller1999) and why intent focus in moral judgments varies across societies (Barrett et al. Reference Barrett, Bolyanatz, Crittenden, Fessler, Fitzpatrick, Gurven, Henrich, Kanovsky, Kushnick, Pisor, Scelza, Stich, von Rueden, Zhao and Laurence2016; McNamara et al. Reference McNamara, Willard, Norenzayan and Henrich2019).

Building from the socio-ecological dynamics that inform cognitive strategies in different contexts, we can then look for how cultural practices and institutions foster the cognition that suits these varied social environments. Heyes cites work on parental mind-mindedness and its correlates with mentalizing development (Taumoepeau & Ruffman Reference Taumoepeau and Ruffman2008), but she does not expand to look at how these parenting practices play out in a wider context of socialization across societies. Mind-mindedness, or the tendency for caregivers to imbue young children with mind by referring to them and (importantly) speaking to them using mentalistic words, is associated with better mentalizing performance across early childhood in WEIRD (Western educated industrialized rich democratic) societies (Carr et al. Reference Carr, Slade, Yuill, Sullivan and Ruffman2018). In these contexts, mind-mindedness is a mark of responsive parenting in an environment where mindreading is an important skill (Taumoepeau & Ruffman Reference Taumoepeau and Ruffman2016). It provides children opportunities to tune their domain-general learning cognition to pick up on the statistical regularities of behaviour that are associated with the mentalistic terms caregivers use, enforcing and transmitting the mind-focused folk theory of mind common in more individualistic societies. Mind-mindedness, therefore, could be seen as a cultural adaptation to enable this mind-imbued social world to propagate across generations. The terms used to discuss mental states may also be cultural innovations to enable mentalizing: Introducing mental state terms predicts better mentalizing performance – even in the same participants (Pyers & Senghas Reference Pyers and Senghas2009).

We temper this with the caveat that mentalizing is operationalized and measured in ways designed by and for mind-focused WEIRD societies. We cannot use these approaches alone to examine whether and how these abilities are developed and deployed in less mind-focused societies. Though mind-mindedness explains some cross-cultural variation in early mentalizing (Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Devine and Wang2017), the more collaborative, authoritative parenting style associated with mind-mindedness in places like the United States does not consistently correlate with mentalizing performance; in some instances, children from more collectivistic, less mind-focused contexts perform better (Vinden Reference Vinden2001). Further, even if mentalizing needs to be taught to children via mind-minded parenting in some societies, that does not mean it must be taught in others. Though explicit teaching is prominent in Western parenting, formal, explicit teaching is comparatively rare in smaller-scale, tightly knit traditional societies (Hewlett Reference Hewlett2016; Kline et al. Reference Kline, Boyd and Henrich2013; Lancy & Grove Reference Lancy, Grove, Lancy, Bock and Gaskins2010). Children in these traditional-society learning environments tend to perform better on observational learning by directing their own attention, whereas children in societies with more emphasis on formal teaching tend to rely more on adults to direct their attention (Clegg & Legare Reference Clegg and Legare2016).

By looking to the wider context of socialization within particular socio-ecological settings, we may further find socialization practices that foster cognition outside the typical focus of mainstream cognitive science. We focus on the example of autobiographical memory transmitted via dyadic reminiscing styles in Māori families. Reminiscing styles typically follow two forms: (1) Elaborative reminiscing builds on existing information using open-ended “wh” questions elicited by adults when recalling the past event (Fivush et al. Reference Fivush, Haden and Reese2006), and (2) repetition reminiscing focuses on repeating one or two informational aspects of a past situation. In New Zealand Māori families, repetition reminiscing is used more heavily for past events that are highly relevant to Māori identity (Reese & Neha Reference Reese and Neha2015; repetition reminiscing appears to have a similar function in Haitian families: Okpewho Reference Okpewho1992). As children grow, reminiscing about past events can become an even more collaborative and an adaptive undertaking with family iterations of discussing different subjective perspectives of an event alongside the facts of the event (Fivush Reference Fivush, Moore and Lemmon2001). This practice of shared, co-constructed recall with children in Māori families builds shared cultural identity and is especially prominent in transmitting social behavioural expectations in discussion of children's past transgressions (Reese et al. Reference Reese, Taumoepeau, Neha, Wainryb and Recchia2014). Existing theories of social transmission (i.e., Godfrey-Smith Reference Godfrey-Smith2012) emphasize individual-level learning and neurobehavioural monitoring. However, the Māori parent-child reminiscing example illustrates how a child's later transgression may require revisiting discussion around a past event, socially building on the shared memory of these events within the family environment. The result is a behavioural monitoring and autobiographical memory system that is jointly produced by individual neural systems and the sociocultural space built by ongoing conversations between child and parent and within the wider whānau Māori (family/community) context.

In addition to building social identity, the reminiscing styles common in Māori families may provide an advantage for recall of early childhood experiences that challenges assumptions about childhood amnesia. Most early childhood recall studies show adults recall their earliest memories around 3–4 years of age (Fivush & Nelson Reference Fivush and Nelson2004). This is not merely a product of garden variety forgetting; when forgetting curves are fitted to adults’ early childhood recollections, there are significantly fewer memories below age 7 than would be expected, there are almost no memories before age 3 (Labov Reference Labov1972), and the earliest coherent memories often take another year to emerge at around age 4½ (Fivush & Nelson Reference Fivush and Nelson2004). However, Māori adults’ earliest recollections average around 2½ years, whereas New Zealand European and Asian adults average around two years later (MacDonald et al. Reference MacDonald, Uesiliana and Hayne2000). These earlier recollections for Māori adults may be due in part to the cultural relevance of past experience (Pere Reference Pere1982; Rewi Reference Rewi2013). Traditionally, Māori communities relied on oral transmission; past recollections have long been steeped throughout oral dissemination that spread and maintained cultural identity and knowledge. Cognitive techniques like mnemonics (e.g., whaikairo, tā moko) and devices (e.g., rākau, tokotoko) to prompt remembering ancestral lineage was paramount for cultural, social, and ecological survival. These cognitive abilities may therefore be seen as specific adaptations to the social learning environment that Māori communities navigate. This provides another example of how a seemingly hard constraint on the human neural system is modulated by cultural socialization practices, leading to context-specific indigenous psychologies that might be completely missed when speaking of nature, nurture, and culture as anything but inextricably bound, building brains to particular environments through cultural adaptation.